This week’s Weekly White House Report Card has our graders dueling over the impact of the latest jobs numbers and pollster John Zogby parsing the polls. His conclusion: President Obama is back to his reelection level of support, and certainly doing better than Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hopes to succeed him.
John Zogby
Not a bad week for the president. Unemployment remains 4.9 percent as 151,000 new jobs were created last month. The downside is that this is fewer than expected and income levels remained static. The Fed says this news means it probably will not raise interest rates so there is no fear of a sluggish downturn before the election.
His putative successor is not doing so hot in the polls but that is more of her doing than his. The same poll that showed Democrat Hillary Clinton leading Republican Donald Trump by 3 points showed Mr. Obama leading Trump by 13 points — 54 percent to 41 percent. That 54 percent is just about what he got when he won in 2008 and 2012. Not bad at all — except if you just hate his guts.
Grade B+
Jed Babbin
Like the wheezy notes of a calliope losing steam, the Obama administration is gasping out political noise as it heads toward the exit. When San Francisco Giants quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to sit out the national anthem from now on White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Kaepernick had every right to do so without noting that many in the military have died in order to give him that right. On a more serious note, Monday marked the admission of the 10,000th Syrian refugee this year despite the FBI’s warning that we had no way to vet them to determine which among them are probably terrorists. President Obama wants to admit as many more as he can before he leaves office.
In mid-week, the White House announced that the president was limiting the military pay raise for 2017 to 1.6 percent, which House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, Texas Republican, condemned saying it is less than provided by law.
The week finished on another low note for the economy. In August, only 151,000 jobs were created, meaning that participation in the labor market was still very low. Headlines proclaimed that “an army of men” were out of a job, the underlying details stating that more than 94 million Americans weren’t in the labor force, up by almost 60,000 since July. Obama’s “jobless recovery” remains an economic oxymoron.
Grade D-
Jed Babbin is an Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him @jedbabbin
John Zogby is the senior analyst for Zogby Analytics and author of “We Are Many, We Are One.” Follow him at @TheJohnZogby
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
